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Part 1: Wildcat

If there’s one thing you can say about mankind
There’s nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitchfork
But it always comes roaring back again

— Tom Waits, “Misery is the River of the World”



Catlike, he lets himself in.

I had been warned to expect an unusual client, and I am not disappointed. I’ve never worked under conditions like these before, and I am still not entirely pleased about the situation, despite the payment — three times my usual fee — already directly deposited into my account. Most especially I’m unsure of conducting the first session in my own home. But everything about this case promises to be out of the ordinary, and the client insisted it could be done no other way.

What is more important, this client represents a challenge. I get few enough of those, these days. People are distressing in the quotidian similarity of their problems. See enough of them and you realize that everyone is more or less the same, and even deviants deviate in a small number of predictable ways. This client’s complaint, similar at first blush to so many others, has upon digging deeper revealed aspects that seem unique.

So, admittedly intrigued, I agreed to break almost all of my own rules. Anyone who knows me well would have been shocked to hear this. Above all other things I value order, consistency, and that should tell you a bit about how eager I am to meet this client.

My visitor is tall and slender, stepping across the threshold of the patio door with a taut, masculine grace. He is no longer quite young. His face, all harsh angles and stark planes, shows the jaded composure of a man who knows his way about the world. It is intensely pale, and under its quiescence lurks a suggestion of something dangerous and different. Eyes that appear almost colorless in the dim light are summing me up with indifferent contemplation. The total effect is curiously alluring, if not precisely described as handsome.

I put down the book I’d been reading, ’Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality’, always good for a laugh and also a delightful palate cleanser before embarking on a new therapeutic relationship in which one might be tempted to see oneself as having all the answers.

“Please, take a seat.” I gesture around the room. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He does so with a markedly feline selectivity, folding himself into the most comfortable chair I own as if he has always belonged there. He cocks his head to the side, his eyes fluttering half closed as he studiously takes in the softly playing music. Raindrops sparkle in his hair and on the shoulders and arms of his black Chesterfield overcoat.

“Is that Cab Calloway?”

I smile across at him. “Close, but no cigar. He’s an impressionist, a fellow named Danny Elfman, but everyone says he sings some damned fine jazz for a redheaded Jew from Texas.”

My visitor gives me a stare that clearly states he thinks I am a peculiar person. Well, he’s judged me correctly. Might as well set all doubts aside from the beginning.

“Way you can tell is, Cab was a tenor and Danny is a flexible but definite baritone. Do you like jazz, Mr. Pendergast?”

“Not even slightly.” He restively re-crosses his legs and settles deeper into the chair.


“We’ll have silence instead.” I turn the music off and lean back into my own chair.

I feel the need to study him prior to determining how to proceed. Of course I’d read and reread all my colleague’s copious notes on him, as well as Glinn’s valuable suggestions, and decided it was better on my part not to labor under any preconceived notions. Well, now — here he is, and I find myself somewhat at a loss.

I clear my throat. “Before we begin, I need to introduce you to something I call the black card. I noticed from reading the previous transcripts that you think you can talk your way out of anything, and you’re probably correct. I’m not here to play verbal volleyball with you. This problem of yours can’t be talked out of existence, as you yourself admitted when you denied the usefulness of traditional psychoanalytic therapy. I agree with that evaluation, by the way.”

“A black card,” he drawls.

“Not an actual physical card. Simply put, when I black card you, you stop talking, stop moving, stop whatever you’re doing. Immediately. If you can’t agree to this, then I won’t be able to help you.”

“Am I allowed a black card to use on you?”

“Of course.” I grin, relaxing a bit. “But only one. Do you agree to these conditions?”

For a long moment he says nothing. All that could be heard now is the soughing of the wind in the tree branches outside, the patter of rain and the first of the year’s spring peepers. “I suppose I must,” he says eventually.

“Excellent. Now, perhaps you can explain why you’ve come to me.”

A inquiring tilt of his elegant head, a cynical lift of the arched brows. “Surely you know everything.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Very well.” In a voice assiduously cleansed of emotion, he states, “I have been unable to achieve sexual climax.”

“And this distresses you.”

“It distresses my paramour.” He underlines his statement with a little, affected laugh. A wry grimace twists his face, the expression of one who wants to turn humiliation to humor.

I refuse to let him get away with that. “That’s an honorable motive,” I said. “Although you speak it as a prevarication.”

“As far as it goes, it’s quite true,” he shoots back, glaring at me with annoyance and surprise before relapsing into unsmiling dourness.

At first I suspected the not uncommon problem of simple reaction formation, that is, the propensity to assert the exact opposite of what one suspects to be true of oneself. Several physicians had cleared him of the more common physical problems (in fact, he is disgustingly healthy) and he’d shown adamant resistance if not outright scorn regarding the techniques of talk therapy.

Good old Freud, as much as the current intellectual elite loves to dismiss him, did coin some useful theoretic phrases that were later confirmed by actual experiments. The most overt gay bashers, when measured by a penile plethysmograph, get bigger erections than non-prejudiced men when shown X-rated male pornography. However, everything I’d read about this client made me highly doubt he’d allow me to attach a gauge to his privy member while screening “Les Manlove and the Nagasaki Angels”, so for the moment that remained a theory.

I then recalled Dr Watson’s observation of Sherlock Holmes, that any emotion and most especially love was abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. ‘He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer . . . for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.’

I take a steadying breath, and plunge directly into the deep end. “From what I understand, you’ve come to associate touch with pain and betrayal,” I say. “It’s a closed feedback loop, since you’ve never let anyone get close enough to prove you wrong. You’re so in control of every aspect of your thinking, you’ve lost the ability to let go and listen to your instincts.”

“What do you propose to do, then? Persuade me otherwise with your touch?” He appears more amused than offended. “After all, I am not—”

I cut him off. “That doesn’t matter. This doesn’t concern gender or sexual orientation.” (although I still have my suspicions) “Sex is about putting tab A into slot B. This is about touch, simple human contact, nothing more or less.”

If he were going to use his black card, it would have been then, I think. “You ask much of me.”

“Just to allow yourself to be touched?”

He sighs deeply, steeples his gloved hands and turns a little to scrutinize the prints on my wall. “I can endure more than you might suspect, if it is required of me.”

“No argument here.” I had access to his medical history. I’d had to put it aside due to nausea more than once.

“You speak of instincts. What, precisely, do you mean?”

“All human beings,” I begin, “Come hardwired with certain instincts. Even when their normal pathways of expression are hindered, the brain still craves stimulation in the same ways. Take someone with autism, for example.”

His eyes cut sideways, casting a keenly scrutinizing glance at me from under a lowered screen of white lashes. I don’t for a moment doubt he’d also checked me out exhaustively before coming tonight. No dissembling, then.

“Take me, then,” I concede. “When I was younger, I would substitute human touch by wrapping myself in heavy quilts, packing my body into small spaces, or stroking and hugging pets.”

“Yet you ended up in this profession?” His voice fluted even softer, almost malicious.

“Sometimes we become fascinated by the things that most repel us.” I wait a moment, but he does not rise to the bait. I continue, “Long story short, I still don’t like being touched. It’s overwhelming. My brain can’t filter out the sensations. The amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and aggression, still fires as if I’m being attacked when someone so much as looks me in the eyes. Most people imagine sex therapists are sex addicts. I’m the opposite. I can think of the human body in purely objective terms because I get no pleasure in touching it.”

Pendergast is smirking faintly.

“Congrats, you’ve successfully derailed the conversation,” I say without rancor. ”My point is, I still crave touch even if what people consider normal affection and contact is overwhelming to the point of repugnance to me. And so do you. You have the same instincts as every other human being. There are circumstances distorting their perception and manifestation, but they are present no matter how hard you try to repress them.”

“Forgive me, but what you see as repression I perceive as vitally important restraint.”

“What would happen, do you think, if you let this particular genie out of the bottle?”

“Instincts . . . primal ways of thinking . . . can not be separated easily from one another. They are all entangled. I can not do that, for your and everyone else‘s safety,” he argues, just as I suspected he would. “My brother and I are not complete opposites. We spring from the same environment, the same upbringing, the same genetics. I know my motivations to be only a few degrees different from his depravity, except that I struggle against what he reveled in—”

“Black card.” I hold up my hand. “Leave your brother out of this for just one moment. I do understand what you’re saying, but it’s irrelevant. No, sit back down and listen to me! Your problem is that this Viola holds no interest for you. No one does.”

Impulsively, I reach out and grasp his wrist in what is intended as an expression of compassion. His reaction is electric. He jerks his hand out of mine as if I’d hurt him, his lips skinning back from his teeth in an expression very like a snarl. He makes as if to expostulate, but I quickly continue.

“Black card’s still up. Look, you say you have feelings for her? Emotion that flourishes on illusion and sickens and dies on realities aren’t worth anything.”

I marvel at him, sitting there scowling at me. He is so magnificent, so isolated and pure, I feel for a moment that my touch had defiled him. But that niveous purity is unnatural, barren and inhospitable as an Antarctic landscape. My own warmth is the warmth of entropy, the heat of rot, the slow destruction and decay of all living things, but paradoxically, it is also the warmth of life. He’d devoted himself to death, studied it, entombed himself in mortality in all its aspects, honed himself mentally and physically to this singular purpose, the destruction of his brother.

And, having achieved that, there is nothing left for him.

More to the point, nothing left in him.

“What have I got to offer in reparation, except my own life?” Pendergast suddenly broke out. Back to the real problem. Not Viola, but Diogenes. Somehow, the pain in his rich, lingering, musical voice is even more apparent when he tries to hide it. “And what good is that? It won’t bring my brother back into the world.”

“Sacrifice is not for utility. It is a penalty we pay.”

“I know that.” He fixes me with a haughty unflinching glare.

I discern a challenge in that lordly, scornful expression, and my manner stiffens. “The point is whether or not you can go on enjoying life after what has happened.”

On the face of it he has everything to look forward to. His career is over, true, but he is talented and accredited enough that he could occupy himself usefully with any number of other interests. It was better he leave the FBI behind, really, seeing as how he used it simply to further his goals of capturing his brother and without that, his job no longer had much meaning. Even if he never worked another day in his life, his family fortunes would more than adequately sustain him. He has his health, he is attractive, albeit in an outre way, he has a potential life-mate. He is the archetypal man who has everything.

“Perhaps you imagine that I allowed my brother to die.“

“You did.” Blunt, yes. Rude. But there is no kindness in softening this blow.

He’s built layers of himself to obscure his death obsession. These surfaces loves of fine clothes, gourmet food, art, obscure literature and pursuits . . . they are too refined, too artificial. There is nothing real at the center, the core was empty.

“I did not love my brother, and I am not in love with life.” His voice is so low, soft and refined that I find it difficult to catch the words.

“Your life is not required.”

I want more than anything to either hug him or throttle him. Of course what he felt for his brother was not the pure and noble ideal of love he’d convinced himself he feels for this Viola, this self-defined sacrifice, but something boiling and obsessive, brutal and torturing.

“Then I don’t understand what you want, or what you are talking about.”

It reminds me of patients with dissociative personality disorder (more commonly, if incorrectly, known as “multiple personality disorder”). Some crisis had occurred early in life at the stage of development when a child is forming the concept of an ego. Most often it was sexual or physical abuse of some sort, but not always. Any kind of deep shock or traumatic event might precipitate the disorder. Thoughts that are approved and consistent with the concept of self are admitted into the main ego, “bad” or overwhelming thoughts are attributed to another self. It’s the same process that in adults leads to feelings of hypnotic control, spirit possession, muses, religious epiphany and so on.

I suspect that what happened was that his child-self had created another persona, one with no memory of the Event, in order to allow himself to go on functioning without being destroyed by self hatred. The original self, memory intact, went to “sleep” and slumbered peacefully until this last memory crossing.

Now it is awake, and trying to integrate with his consciousness. But the original self had remained a child. Just a boy, an unable to understand the complexities of adult sexuality and hence the erectile dysfunction.

Or had it?

Perhaps the separation between self and not-self hadn’t been completed until he was a teenager. I surreptitiously check my notes again. He had said that as an adolescent, he’d discovered Diogenes’s notebooks. There was no exact description of what he read in them. Possibly, seeing what was in there had partially reawakened the memories of the traumatized nine year old.

I glance up again. Possibly . . . and possibly he had not entirely been repulsed by them. Possibly he found himself interested in them.

“It’s not my place to demand a sacrifice from you, Mr. Pendergast. That would be compliance on your part, not sacrifice. I can merely offer, and you must feel that there is nothing else for you to do.”

“You’re being very mysterious.”

I duck my head, dropping my voice nearly to a whisper. “Am I? I don’t mean to be. There’s only one relief from remorse.”

“What are you suggesting?”

He did willingly admit that there was a fine line between his brother’s madness and his own. If his reaction to the notebooks was not complete repulsion, this boundary would have been threatened with erasure. In that moment, reading the notebooks, he’d woken for an instant, the terrified nine year old child into the confused youth.

Damn, it would have been a hellacious second trauma, and again the true monster was himself.

That day, the adolescent Aloysius had been put to sleep, too, that day when he realized the fiend his brother had become and dedicated his life to stopping him. In order to slay this monster, though, he cast himself as much as an opposite as he could. Repressing his own twisted desires, and his innocent sexual drive along with it. He had essentially frozen his development in time. The proxy, the construct, the facade had developed, while inside the real Aloysius remained a teenaged boy, with all that implied.

I put my notes aside. There was nothing further to be learned from them. From here on in, it must be played by ear. “That suggests nothing to you? Perhaps it doesn’t.”

And so the adult Aloysius had rationalized his interest in murders into their prevention. But to do so, he would have been required to study them thoroughly, thus quietly satisfying his repressed bloodlust in the guise of detached, respectable research. In order to slay dragons, we must become dragons ourselves. Or admit we were dragons all along.

He sighs; not a gentle sound, but the meditative rumbling of a tiger crouched to spring. “What . . . sacrifice?”

I clasp his hand, very carefully. This time he doesn’t pull away. Slipping off and discarding the butter-soft black leather glove, I admire the strong bones of his bared hand, turning it over, letting my thumb trail across his palm, fingernail tracing the scrawl of sea-green veins along the underside of his wrist. “Has it occurred to you that this pain of yours can hardly come to an end unless you make some kind of voluntary surrender?”

This wasn’t going to be easy for either of us. I usually don’t go so fast, but I’d become convinced I could spend the evening doing no more than stroking his cheek and he would leave and find a way to never see me again. For someone so tightly in control of himself, he is pitiably unaware of his own dilemma.

“Now I will tell you what sacrifice I suggest to you,” I say. “It’s a hard one, but I think it’s what you require.”

What I plan to do might very well destroy him. And if it didn’t, if his psyche somehow survived, it might also become warped into what he feared the most. The killer self he’d repressed could burst forth and overwhelm the fragile construct of the civilized, courteous and cultured gentleman he thought he was.

It is a chance that has to be taken. To leave him like this, in this terrible state of chaos and angst, would be to condemn him to an inevitable slide into madness. His ego ideal is a castle built on sand. He needs this, the knowledge he can let go a bit of that control and not be destroyed or destroy everything around him, to begin rebuilding a firm basis. Otherwise, sooner or later, he will confront the emptiness in himself and lose himself in the abyss.

I realize that what I said next also meant taking my life into my own hands.

“Aloysius,” I say. “I want to make love to you.”

For a long moment, there is no reaction at all. I visualize the cogs and gears grinding and turning in his mind, the naked calculation, weighing and balancing and layers of self control and denial locking down.

“Black card! Stop thinking so hard.” I leap up and grab him by the lower jaw, ignoring the dangerous tension in his pose, and force him to look down at me. Eye contact, the most basic of intimacies.

His eyes, still hard as hailstones, slowly close, and he says in a different, abrasive voice, “Listen. I have stared death in the face. It accuses me, and demands to know what I have made of my life. I‘ve waded here through blood, and nothing good can come from it.”

“Then you feel your life is worthless, to be given to anyone who asks it?”

“No, it goes beyond that. There is a certain joy in giving freely what others can only take from me by force. It isn‘t sarcasm, or despondency, or bitterness . . . ” Beneath the pallor and composure of that ascetic face, I see he is deeply conflicted.

I wonder if that woman of his comprehends even a portion of what he suffered through, or was capable — willing — of doing so.

“What’s bothering you, honestly,” I inquire. “If you find me so repulsive, I can suggest someone else for you. A female colleague, perhaps? Remember, this is your choice. It‘s meaningless otherwise.”

He turns away from me with the resolve of a man abandoning himself to the firing squad, and takes a swift, decisive step towards the patio door.

“Pendergast,” I say. “You do realize that if you walk out that door, this will never be resolved. The sexual dysfunction is only a symptom, and the least of them. You took your brother’s life. You have no right to throw away your own.”

He pauses in mid-step, his features contorted with defiance yet paradoxically needy.

“Stop thinking at all. For once in your shit life, don’t think about it. I’m asking you to give in, to let someone else take care of you. To enjoy yourself in a totally non-intellectual, instinctual way. What’s your first impulse?”

“Yes,” he hisses. His long pike’s jaw clench tight, teeth bared, the muscles in his temple jerking with tension.

“Good, good.” I am proud of him, and a bit surprised. I didn’t think he would have caved so readily. He had been more stirred up than I realized.

“You’re like some wildcat raised in captivity,” I tell him in a soothing voice. Reaching up, I run my fingers through his still-wet hair, timing the strokes with the rhythm of my speech. Touching the head is a very personal gesture. Only parents and children, or lovers, usually do so. “You have the ability, you have the instincts and the drive, but you’ve never been taught how to express it, never had a chance to practice. Now you’ve been let out of your cage, released into the wild, and you have no idea what to do. You’re helpless.”

How odd to think of someone like him as helpless.

Odd, yet oddly arousing. He is a decade older than me, though you would never be able to tell. Like most very thin people, his skin hadn’t wrinkled much and there is no way to distinguish pure white hairs amidst all that cornsilk blond. But he is also considerably taller, and in excellent shape. I try to keep in shape, but I’m simply not a very physically overpowering person to begin with. He could easily overpower me, injure me badly and leave.

Instead, he leans into me, his chin almost on my shoulder, and lets out a long, shuddering breath.

“Not here.” I put a firm hand on the back of his neck, urging him to stand straight, and lead him scruffed like a disobedient kitten to the bedroom. Not my bedroom, of course, which looks like someone set off a grenade in a library then dumped an unmade bed in the middle of the wreckage. This is a small guest room I had especially prepared for tonight.

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